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Why Jack Lew (POLITICO LIVE)

Obama announces Lew as chief of staff

POLITICO Playbook Breakfast with Jack Lew, Nov. 2011

President Barack Obama will nominate White House chief of staff Jack Lew for Treasury secretary as soon as Thursday, according to a person briefed on the matter. In doing so, Obama is throwing Lew straight into the middle of an increasingly nasty budget war, the likes of which Washington hasn’t seen since the mid-1990s.

Lew should be prepared for this type of fiscal and political environment, though — he helped President Bill Clinton strike the 1997 balanced budget accord as a top official at the Office of Management and Budget, the agency he has since run for both presidents. And Lew played an important role in the contentious 2011 debt ceiling debate.

Now, however, the liberal New Yorker will have an exponentially higher profile.

There is a certain symmetry to the pick. Four years ago, Obama’s nomination of Geithner, then the president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank and an architect of the 2008 bailouts, signaled the urgency of reassuring markets still gripped by the largest financial meltdown since the Great Depression.

The president’s decision to put Lew in the Treasury post four years later illustrates the crisis of the moment: the federal budget.

Lew’s nomination comes a week after Washington barely averted a fiscal cliff free fall and just as lawmakers gird for a series of three new fiscal dramas — a looming debt ceiling breach and the start of the spending sequester in two months, and a possible government shutdown in late March.

While Lew’s résumé is far different than many of the Wall Street titans and captains of industry who have succeeded Alexander Hamilton atop the Treasury Department, he is no stranger to Wall Street. From 2006 to 2009, the Harvard and Georgetown Law graduate worked as chief operating officer at the Citigroup Alternative Investments unit.

The majority of his career, however, has been spent as a behind-the-scenes Washington operator helping advance the agenda of his boss — whether Tip O’Neill, Bill Clinton or Obama — while keeping himself out of the spotlight.

The lifelong Democrat is known to lawmakers on Capitol Hill as a formidable ally — and adversary. When Hillary Clinton became secretary of State in 2009 with an eye to increasing its budget after years of war in South Asia and the Middle East, one of her first moves was to pick Lew, her husband’s former OMB director, as a deputy. In 2010, he took the reins at OMB again, before replacing Bill Daley as White House chief of staff in 2012.

“The thing that I learned early on was there’s a space in Washington that is not deeply populated, which is a bridge between the highly technical and the political,” Lew told POLITICO for a profile in 2011. “You didn’t have to be the best politician, and you didn’t have to be the best numbers cruncher or analyst. But if you could be fluent in both worlds and respected enough in both worlds, you could have an opportunity to be a translator and to make a difference.”

From 2006 to 2009, the Harvard and Georgetown Law graduate worked as chief operating officer at the Citigroup Alternative Investments unit.

Well, that should make him perfect for the job then, right?

I mean, he obviously helped drive CitiGroup into the ground, and clearly left just as the train plowed into the station, so what other qualifications are necessary?

In any case, I know what this man and this president are contemplating, and that is capitulating to the Republican conservative demands that we take an axe to the checks we send to retired old people, deny medical care to sick people, and slash the help we give to disabled and poor children.

And then dramatically increase spending on our military.

Should this man, and this president, go along with this right wing lunacy, they will prove that the Democrats are every bit as immoral, ignorant, and greedy as your average, run-of-the-mill right winger.

So long as Republican “Mitt Romney” conservatives continue to offer little more than this type of trite, hackneyed, childish pabulum – meaningless, small-minded, and insubstantial – so long will they continue to lose the trust and respect of the majority of the American people.

There are reasoned, rational, REAL grounds to object to President Obama, his agenda, his record, and his appointees. The kind of things that level headed people can debate and understand.

Either Republicans are unable to see this because of ignorance and willful insulation, or they know it and they’re just so driven by hate and fear that they refuse to do it.

Or, it could be that so many of them simply enjoy being rapacious, mean, snide, destructive little jerks.

In any case, as a liberal I would like to thank you for demonstrating, once again, just why most Republican conservatives are viewed my most of the American people as beneath contempt.

You’re helping to get more Democrats elected, and more liberal SC justices appointed.

The Treasury Sec is very important in this environment where we need to inspire some confidence in our creditors and the markets. Mr. Lew's non-political experience is very very thin; three years at Citi hardly qualifies. And OMB is no success story. Wouldn't any qualified Dems agree to ride the ship down? Did the Boss just tell him he had to take one for the team? (By the way, I wonder what "alternative investments" he dealt with in the pre-collapse period?)

Geithner and Obama failed together, as proven by the economy four years later. Why we would expect a wise choice from Obama now is laughable! Anyone competent nominee would tell Obama to lower the deficits by cutting spending. Therefore, no competent nominee will be found. Narcissists hate to be told, "No!"

Anyone competent nominee would tell Obama to lower the deficits by cutting spending.

It's already 2-to-1 spending cuts to revenue. If the sequestor goes through, it will be 3-to-1. If Republicans want additional spending cuts then they need to say exactly what those should be. So far they have been reluctant to do so. Wonder why?

if I were the cynical type, I'd think that picking Lew, an Orthodox Jew, was partly motivated by his desire to calm Nety in Israel and someJewish groups in the U.S. after the Hagel appointment ... but, luckily, I'm not the cynical type ...